Well, that's a heck of a thing to get hit with this early in the morning.

I was all set to come in here and tell you about the black widow spider on my driveway, but I got this e-mail from my boss...

There's a training session on testing that would be a good class for a QA to take. They've been promising me training for almost a year now. And this class is free, so all the company would have to pay for is my travel expense.

But that's the kicker - it involves travel. I'd be gone for three days at the end of January, which is before we'd planned to wean Penny (but not that much before). And it would be leaving Matt alone with a fairly high-maintenance baby, with no one around to give him a break (except that we could probably get my parents or some friends to come over in the evenings to help him out).

My boss says it's my decision, but I need to give him an answer by the end of the day tomorrow.

Cripes.

So yeah, I skipped my journal entry yesterday. Instead, Matt and I took Penny to the doctor, who ran some tests and determined that yeah, she's picked up some little virus - not the flu, but something else - and we're pretty much just going to have to let it run its course.

Luckily, most of her worst screaming and crying behavior was over yesterday. Instead, she opted to sleep for most of the day. I was a little worried that it would make her unable to sleep at night, but aside from an early wake-up at 10:30, she got through the night on approximately her usual schedule.

Oh, yeah, and the black widow spider.

I came home from work one day last week to find a black widow spider on the driveway. She was unmistakeably dead, thank goodness, in that classic "dead-spider" pose that allowed me to get a good look at that red hourglass, in case the body shape had left anything to doubt.

She was smaller than I generally think of black widow spiders as being. Maybe that's because I've only before ever seen them in pictures, and photographers tend to pick especially large specimens to get good shots. Or maybe she was just an unusually small black widow. I dunno.

(As an aside, I keep almost typing "window" instead of "widow." My fingers have been trained.)

I was too squeamish to do anything about the body, either to squash it or kick it into the grass, so I've been side-stepping it each morning as I get into my car.

This morning we had a tremendous downpour of rain, and when I left for work, the little carcass was nowhere to be seen. Guess the rain washed her away.

--Liz